The giant manta ray, one of the world’s most graceful and mysterious creatures, is facing a new threat from the Chinese medicine trade. A little-known “coastal tonic” from Southern China has been resurrected by shark fin traders in the city of Guangzhou, according to a report today. Among the

The diplomatic spat over the Falkland Islands has intensified and moved underwater as Argentina threatens to cut the UK’s South Atlantic territory off from its unlikely economic lifeline: squid. Squid have made the Falkland Islands rich but the cephalopods begin life in Argentine waters and

A world without its white cap of ice looks likely to be less hospitable to human beings, not just polar bears. Not only does the frozen north reflect sunlight back into space, it also traps methane, a greenhouse gas. But the Arctic’s power to do these things is waning as it melts, turning it into

Britain is to push for a freeze on key European fishing rules designed to restore ailing cod stocks. Whitehall sources said that ministers would be using the “strongest possible terms” to fight measures set to reduce the number of days at sea that fisherman are permitted, after an outcry from

For half a century fishermen had been taking too many cod from the seas around Britain, but no one realised there was a problem. But by the end of the 1990s it was evident that the nation’s favourite fish was disappearing. Landings from the North Sea fell from an average 250,000 tonnes from 1965 to

Britain has drawn up plans for a huge marine protection zone close to the Falkland Islands in a move that is certain to trigger a furious reaction from Argentina. The area of some one million square kilometres around the tiny sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, where the Falklands conflict

Being terrestrial, it is an easy mistake to make. When we peer under water, our eyes seek out solid features and ignore the space in between. We are used to living in air, a medium that is largely lifeless save for the occasional insect, bird or bacteria. Not so the ocean. Squint into the midwater

Deep-sea trawlers from mainland Europe are destroying diverse and fragile coral gardens off the northwest coast of the UK in an industry that is only possible thanks to EU subsidies, a new report has highlighted. Some of Britain’s most extraordinary landscapes are to be found a kilometre below the

Somali pirates kidnapped a disabled French woman as she slept at her home in a Kenyan coastal paradise early yesterday morning, three weeks after British woman Judith Tebbutt was abducted and her husband killed in the same area. The wheelchair-bound, 75-year-old woman was kidnapped after armed men

Somali pirates kidnapped a disabled French woman as she slept at her home in a Kenyan coastal paradise earlier this morning, three weeks after British woman Judith Tebbutt was abducted and her husband killed in the same area. The wheelchair-bound woman, named as French film producer Marie Didieu